


One More Night

by miera



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:44:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miera/pseuds/miera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're taking shifts, which is never a good sign.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One More Night

**Author's Note:**

> It's Sparktober in July! Translation: this is mylittleredgirl's fault.

They're taking shifts, which is never a good sign. John's mostly concerned that Elizabeth doesn't seem to know it, which scares him. She's still withdrawn into some place in her own head. It happens after a really bad crisis. He's seen her go through enough of them to know her patterns. But it's been over a week and she hasn't been bitching at him during one of their private conversations about people mother-henning her. Usually that happens within a day or two and he knows she's back to normal. Not this time, and the hovering is blindingly obvious.

Chuck, Miko and a couple other people are "randomly" appearing in Elizabeth's office in the morning with two cups of coffee and two muffins or whatever facsimile of pastry the mess had that morning. Of course, it's entirely not random because they always just happen to turn up after Elizabeth has gotten out of a meeting, which is the easiest time to talk her into anything, because her mind will still be processing the meeting itself and not entirely paying attention.

Not that John would have reason to know that fact.

He wonders if Lorne talked to Chuck. John's XO had informed him with a worried frown that Dr. Weir hadn't been seen in the mess during breakfast for a few days. That was right before the muffin parade started.

Radek and several of the other department heads had started requesting meetings with Elizabeth during lunch, which they always suggested happen in the mess hall. Then Ronon showed with a checkers set he had gotten from someone. Elizabeth told John that night that Ronon had complained he couldn't learn the game from John or Rodney because they used too many cultural references. John had to admit that was probably not just an excuse.

Teyla has been bringing tea and Athosian biscuits to Elizabeth's office in the afternoons. They're not really biscuits in the American sense; more like a really dry cookie. This is at least fairly normal. Teyla and Elizabeth had what they called "ritual tea" whenever Teyla was in the city. It's one of their in-jokes, and John has never asked for details, not wanting to know exactly what they got up to during those conversations.

Rodney's the only one who plows ahead as if nothing happened, aside from the occasional stricken look of alarm if Elizabeth mentions a headache or any other discomfort. Sometimes Rodney's lack of nuance can be comforting, John knows.

Carson had threatened Elizabeth with mandatory check-ins in the infirmary if she didn't eat supper every night so she trucks down to the mess without anyone fussing at her to do so. Carson's been making more visits to the control room in general, but he knows better than to badger Elizabeth or hope that she'll really take it easy. He'd once gotten irritated with Teyla for her customary "shove the bone back in, I can go kill Wraith" attitude about being in the infirmary and told her that only Elizabeth was a worse patient than Teyla. Short of confining her in the infirmary there's not much anyone can do, and after hearing the bare bones version of what happened to her, nobody, not even Carson, wants to inflict more doctors on Elizabeth.

So John has the late shift. Because Elizabeth invariably ends up back in her office late at night, after Carson has gone to sleep and the gamma shift has taken over in the control room. So he goes to her office then.

It's not like he can sleep either.

He comes in with his laptop, making a dumb show of doing some work himself on her couch. Elizabeth never questions why he would prefer to sit with his tablet awkwardly perched on his lap rather than in his own office or his quarters. He actually does do some reports some nights. Others he plays Tetris for a while until the slump in Elizabeth's shoulders grows too pronounced to ignore.

The second night, he suggested she get some sleep after she yawned loud enough to crack her jaw audibly. Elizabeth shook her head, not meeting his eyes. He didn't think he was supposed to have heard her muttered admission, "I can't." There was a haunted look on her face that hit him like a punch in the stomach.

Instead he suggests they go for a walk. They wander around the uninhabited parts of the city, away from living quarters. He doesn't want to imply that he's steering her toward her room. He and Ronon had moved a couch from one of the lounges out onto a balcony part of the way down the control tower, and John ensures the path of their midnight walks ends there.

He flops onto the couch, giving Elizabeth little choice but to sit down next to him. They talk quietly, sometimes about commonplace things, city gossip, things they miss from home. Just as the exhaustion is hitting them both, Elizabeth will start to talk.

It's bits and pieces, nothing coherent even after a week, but it's more than she says to anyone else. She's not going to Kate. Despite medical confidentiality, as the second-in-command John needed to know about Elizabeth's mental state, so Kate told him that Elizabeth wasn't making appointments. He knows from these 1 a.m. conversations that the nanites made her think she was crazy, that there was a hospital and a doctor and drugs. John's never been fond of shrinks in general, and he doesn't have those excuses.

He knows she thought Atlantis was lost, and he knows that she saw him, heard him, when she was fighting back. He was her anchor in there.

Each night she tells him a little bit more, and then Elizabeth drifts off, her head against his shoulder. She has nightmares, even there with him. Once she woke up frantically touching her face, asking him if he could see her. He traced the line of her cheek with his thumb, reassuring her until she fell back asleep, clutching tightly at his arm.

John fights against sleeping, wanting to just stare at her, assuring himself that she's really there and not still stuck in that goddamned tent, dying in front of him. He gives in eventually, but when his own nightmares wake him up, he can look down and see Elizabeth curled up in a ball and manage to get back to sleep.

They can't do this indefinitely. A few hours of sleep sitting upright on a couch isn't a substitute for real rest, though they've functioned on less before. He thinks eventually Elizabeth will tell him enough that she can come back fully and go back to her normal schedule.

But every night as he walks toward her office, he hopes this isn't that night, that he won't lose her back behind the professional wall they have to maintain, that he can have one more night of Elizabeth warm against his body as he sleeps.


End file.
